From a private school in Leipzig, where he had shown all a boy's tact in finding what his masters thought the value of each subject they taught; where he had joined in the vandalism of using a battering-ram to break a way to the hated science apparatus and to destroy it; feeling that the classical writers were overpraised; and where at the age of sixteen he had appeared several times in public as a reciter of his own poems, Max Müller returned to Leipzig and entered upon the freedom of university life there at the age of seventeen. For years his chief enjoyment was music.[51] He played the piano well, heard everything he could in concert or opera, was an oratorio tenor, and grew more and more absorbed in music, so that he planned to devote himself altogether to it and also to enter a musical school at Dessau, but nothing came of it. At the university he saw little of society, was once incarcerated for wearing a club ribbon, and confesses that with his boon companions he was guilty of practises which would now bring culprits into collision with authorities. He fought three duels, participated in many pranks and freakish escapades, but nevertheless attended fifty-three different courses of lectures in three years. When Hegelism was the state philosophy, he tried hard to understand it, but dismissed it with the sentiments expressed by a French officer to his tailor, who refused to take the trousers he had ordered to be made very tight because they did not fit so closely that he could not get into them. Darwin attracted him, yet the wildness of his followers repelled. He says, "I confess I felt quite bewildered for a time and began to despair altogether of my reasoning powers." He wonders how young minds in German universities survive the storms and fogs through which they pass. With bated breath he heard his elders talk of philosophy and tried to lay hold of a word here and there, but it all floated before his mind like mist. Later he had an Hegelian period, but found in Herbart a corrective, and at last decided upon Sanskrit and other ancient languages, because he felt that he must know something that no other knew, and also that the Germans had then heard only the after-chime and not the real striking of the bells of Indian philosophy. From twenty his struggles and his queries grew more definite, and at last, at the age of twenty-two, he was fully launched upon his career in Paris, and later went to Oxford.